He's pretty upset about the stimulus package and about how the whole thing went down. While he has plenty of negative things to say about the Repugs, he's also pretty discouraged by how Barack handled it. Money quote:
And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years.
Ugh. Happy Friday, everyone!
5 comments:
yeah, i saw that too and was pretty freaked out. i mean, it's not like krugman is just some wack job alarmist.
maybe barack just needs to throw bipartisanship out the window (it ain't working and we just end up losing philosophical and practical battles) and try to get the country back on track using his best instincts, advice and expertise.
The thing is, there are other highly-regarded economists, are there not, who are more favorable about this stuff.
Meaning, who is the expertist expert on something that is no longer in the theoretical, but exists fo' real? Who the hell actually knows? Maybe Krugman, but maybe Summers or Geithner or Rush Limbaugh.
Face it, Sassyists, in our shared experience, economists are awesome at making braised greens, but what the hell do they really know about the economy? (OUCH! GWu just hit me upside the head with his wok).
And, B.O. is going to keep doing the bi-partisan thing until everyone is so sick of him being so concilliatory that they just give up and he wins. Pretty much like how he courted Michelle.
well, summers was essentially fired from harvard and geithner stole money meant to pay for his taxes. so i'm not feeling so great about those two right now. i'm putting all my money on barack--who should be flying over campus any minute now.
The Krugman stuff definitely worries me, but I think politically, Barack is doing the right thing right now. By extending the olive branch so openly, when he does drop the majority hammer on the Repugs I think the public will be on his side.
As for the economics, I'm sure some economists are more positive, but Krugman's been awfully right about this stuff for a while. In the end, though, I don't so how we could have passed a package as large as Krugman's been calling for--over $2 trillion. No way that would have passed. Maybe this bill is inadequate, but politics constrained it severely. My fear is that if this stimulus has no real impact, people will want to pull back to the Repug view, even though that's been so disastrous for so long.
I did not mean to demean or otherwise suggest Krugman wasn't brilliant and more-right than just about anyone. Just that this stuff is unprecedented and it's hard to say.
But, ilsa, i will slap your hand for being completely ad hominen in your criticisms of Summers and Geithner. Those things have nothing, really, to do with this (though I don't like Larry Summers, the person and the Obama appointees' tax problems are ludicrous).
Anyhow, the one guy we can all agree on is Nate Silver, and he had this to say about Geithner, and the stimulus:
"I don't know that he's the right guy for the job. But what I do know is the following:
1. Nobody, absolutely nobody, has more incentive to get this right than the Obama Administration. If the economy collapses -- well, more than it already has collapsed -- then the Democrats get slaughtered in 2010, Obama is a one-termer, health care doesn't happen, the poverty rate increases by a couple orders of magnitude, and the imperative to fix the environment gets put on the backburner. To suggest that Obama or Geithner are tools of Wall Street and are looking out for something other than the country's best interest is freaking asinine. Maybe their ideas are wrong -- but their hearts are in the right place....I'm sorry, but somewhere between 99.9% and 99.999999% of us are severely underqualified to be making policy recommendations on this particular issue. And I'm certainly in the majority on this one. My anecdotal experience for the past several months has been that the more someone knows about the economy, the more they know (or at least are willing to admit to) what they don't know. Anyone who is professing with certainty that this or that will work -- nationalizing the banks, for instance -- is an idiot."
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